Tag Archives: artistic expression

Warriors and chiefs! should the shaft or the sword
Pierce me in leading the host of the Lord,
Heed not the corse, though a king’s in your path:
Bury your steel in the bosoms of Gath!

Thou who art bearing my buckler and bow,
Should the soldiers of Saul look away from the foe,
Stretch me that moment in blood at thy feet!
Mine be the doom which they dared not to meet.

Farewell to others, but never we part,
Heir to my royalty, son of my heart!
Bright is the diadem, boundless the sway,
Or kingly the death, which awaits us today!

To understand this poem, you should be familiar with the biblical story of the death of Saul, as told in I Samuel 31. Saul is leading a battle against the Philistines, and things do not go well for the Israelites. Saul’s sons are slain, and the warriors flee. So Saul decides to take his own life, rather than be abused and killed by the “uncircumcised.”

Byron sees this as the ultimate heroic act, to sacrifice yourself rather than compromise your ideals. There is nothing weak about Saul’s decision to take his own life. It is totally an act of courage and bravery.

So why would this be so important to Byron? There are a couple possibilities. He could be expressing his unwavering commitment to a romantic love, vowing to die rather than allow another to pierce his heart. But I think a more plausible interpretation is that Byron is asserting his staunch adherence to his artistic ideals. Byron has a clear vision of his poetry and what he wishes to convey through his works. He would rather die than compromise his artistic integrity and create baser works intended for the Philistine masses.

I confess I looked online to see what others thought about this poem, and really did not find any out there, so these are just my personal thoughts on the poem. Feel free to let me know if you have a different impression of what Byron was trying to express. I would love to hear your thoughts. Cheers!

Art has the ability to express that which standard forms of communication are unable to convey. This is particularly true when it come to the expression of the deeper regions of the subconscious. Often, these recesses contain our darkest thoughts, the fodder from which our nightmares take shape. It is this realm that the artist in this tale by Lovecraft delves into for inspiration.

You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like Pickman’s. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There’s something those fellows catch—beyond life—that they’re able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or—I hope to heaven—ever will again.

Artists who explore these darker regions of the psyche are skirting the fringes of insanity. But often, an artist must temporarily let go of sanity in order to glimpse the internal landscapes which provide inspiration for truly powerful creations.

He shewed me all the paintings and drawings he had about; including some pen-and-ink sketches that would, I verily believe, have got him kicked out of the club if many of the members had seen them. Before long I was pretty nearly a devotee, and would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum.

Lovecraft uses tunnels and wells as symbols for the entry and exploration of the buried realms of the subconscious. When the characters enter the cellar and uncover the well, leading down into the tunnels below Boston, they are symbolically letting go of their fragile sanity and opening themselves to the darker mysteries of the psyche.

My host was now leading the way down cellar to his actual studio, and I braced myself for some hellish effects among the unfinished canvases. As we reached the bottom of the damp stairs he turned his flashlight to a corner of the large open space at hand, revealing the circular brick curb of what was evidently a great well in the earthen floor. We walked nearer, and I saw that it must be five feet across, with walls a good foot thick and some six inches above the ground level—solid work of the seventeenth century, or I was much mistaken. That, Pickman said, was the kind of thing he had been talking about—an aperture of the network of tunnels that used to undermine the hill. I noticed idly that it did not seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disc of wood formed the apparent cover. Thinking of the things this well must have been connected with if Pickman’s wild hints had not been mere rhetoric, I shivered slightly; then turned to follow him up a step and through a narrow door into a room of fair size, provided with a wooden floor and furnished as a studio. An acetylene gas outfit gave the light necessary for work.

The danger that artists face when exploring the subconscious is that they may ultimately plummet into insanity, losing all touch with the world of light and getting lost forever in the realm of shadows.

Richard Upton Pickman, the greatest artist I have ever known—and the foulest being that ever leaped the bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness. Eliot—old Reid was right. He wasn’t strictly human. Either he was born in strange shadow, or he’d found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. It’s all the same now, for he’s gone—back into the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt.

Creative people should never shy away from looking into the depths of the soul for inspiration. But they should do so with care. It’s important to stay grounded when unlocking the forbidden gates of the mind.

Time drops in decay,
Like a candle burnt out,
And the mountains and woods
Have their day, have their day;
What one in the rout
Of the fire-born moods
Has fallen away?

Moods by nature are ephemeral. They tend to last only a short time and are generally caused by some event or thought. But Yeats compares moods to things more lasting, specifically mountains and woods, which are also temporary but endure for a long time. So what are the moods that Yeats is writing about?

Since the word “moods” is plural, it is clear he is experiencing more than one mood at the same time. Also, we are told that these moods are born from fire. An obvious mood would be love or passion, a mood clearly associated with fire. But I would also venture to say that one of the moods is associated with creative inspiration, the spark of the creative flame which, if not nurtured, quickly burns out like the candle. And I suspect there is a third mood, relating to divine inspiration or illumination. Again, this “mood” is fleeting, and usually once you realize that you are having a moment of divine connection, it immediately dissipates.

My final thought on this poem may be a bit of a stretch, but as I read it a few times, I could not help but wonder if there is also an allusion to “modes.” When read aloud with an accent, it is possible. If this is the case, then Yeats may also have been asserting that there are various modes of artistic and spiritual expression, and that each mode is also ephemeral and dependent upon the artist and the audience. At some points poetry and literature may be the dominant mode, other times painting, other times music, or film. As such, moods and modes are always changing.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts. Yeats is always challenging, and it seems the more pared down his poems are, the more you have to work to understand them. Feel free to share your thoughts on this one. Cheers!

So I really wanted to hate this, especially since it pulls in a slew of other characters from the Marvel Universe, something I don’t particularly care for. But the fact is, it was quite good, and the villain, Mephisto (clearly a graphic rendering of Mephistopheles), is diabolical in a most refined manner.

So the basic premise of this arc is that Doctor Strange “resurrects” Las Vegas, which appears to have been destroyed at some point after I had stopped reading Doctor Strange because the quality plummeted, in my opinion. Anyway, one of the negative ramifications of resurrecting the city is that he inadvertently brought Mephisto out of Hell and he now has dominion over the City of Sin. Having been to Vegas for the first time recently, the idea of the city being ruled by a demon is not too much of a stretch for me. But I digress.

The most intriguing aspect of this issue is Mephisto’s commentaries on the nature of sin, and humanity’s tendency to embrace the darker side of the human experience.

Sin!! It doesn’t take much, you understand. It’s your natural condition, after all — has been since the apple and the garden… if you believe that sort of thing. I’m still on the fence myself. Point is, you just love to do what you’re told not to do, and I’m not blaming you — Heavens no! I understand you, admire you, accept who you really are, what you really want. You want to rip each other apart. You want to see some blood.

Of course, this is a pretty bleak assessment of humanity, but it’s not without justification. There are a lot of people who fall into Mephisto’s view, but there are also many who do not. And that is what Doctor Strange is betting on, that there is at least as much good in the world as there is evil, if not more. I for one share the view. We are bombarded with news and hype focusing on the negative, feeding off our fears, but really, there is so much good happening, we just don’t hear about it as much.

What started as a really interesting arc has completely plummeted into stupidity. I’m glad there is only one issue left; otherwise I would drop it at this point. The folks are Marvel need to learn that you do not make a story interesting by throwing more and more into it; a story is interesting when there is cohesion, thoughtful crafting of the language, and evocative imagery. To just toss in a bunch of other characters, such as Howard the Duck casting magical spells, and think you are going to appeal to a wider audience is kind of pathetic.

If resorting to inclusion of the tired Avengers wasn’t bad enough, the writers also rely on the hackneyed trope of the “word of God” actually being a text created by an alien being. Please! Erich Von Daniken wrote Chariots of the Gods? back in 1968. What’s next—mystical text as computer code?

If you read my blog regularly, you know I try to find something positive or inspirational in whatever I read. I was unable to do so here. I actually feel like I wasted the 15 minutes it took me to read this installment.

This is the final book in the series and the focus is on the shift in human consciousness that accompanies the apocalypse. In order to fully grasp what Moore is expressing, it is important to understand that the apocalypse is a symbolic end of the world. It is the end of reality as we perceive it and signifies the crossing of the threshold into the new stage of human evolution.

“It’s like she’s had some massive breakdown in her sense of what’s real. Maybe that’s what ‘end of the world’ means.”

Reality as we know it is only a shared perception. We are taught that a table is a table and a building is a building, and we filter our sensory input accordingly. The apocalypse, therefore, will be a collective shift in how humans perceive the world around us.

“Yes, space and time, our selves, our whole world… these things only ever existed in our perceptions. Now those perceptions are changing.”

There is a conception that when the apocalypse occurs, that it will signal the end of humankind, that we will all be magically transported from the earth to a heavenly place. This will only occur symbolically. We will still exist on this physical plane, we will still have to deal with life, but our perceptions will be vastly different.

“”I mean, it’s not like there weren’t going to still be questions and choices after the apocalypse. What, did we just think we’d all just go to heaven and there’d be no more problems, or diseases, or earthquakes? No, we all woke up one day after the world ended, and we still had to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our heads. Life goes on, y’know? Life goes on.”

The final chapter in this book goes deep into the exploration of consciousness and the symbols used to express it. Since it is impossible to study consciousness using the scientific method, we must turn to art and mysticism as ways to explore this aspect of ourselves.

“Both angels and imaginative thoughts, being phenomena not highly reliable under laboratory conditions, are equally outside the province of empirical science. Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing.”

Moore goes on to assert that consciousness is dependent upon language and symbols, that without these tools, we as unable to grasp and understand our conscious selves. Words and symbols actually give our consciousness form and shape.

“Consciousness is an astonishing gift, too precious to be squandered on material concerns alone. And consciousness, modern theory maintains, is built on language. Before we’re conscious of something, we must have a word for it. The only reality we can ever know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language.”

I’d like to conclude by saying I have read a fair amount of comics and graphic novels so far in my life, and this series is by far the best that I have read. And the genre is perfect for conveying this type of deep metaphysical information, because, as Moore points out, the genre naturally communicates with both aspects of the psyche simultaneously.

“Pentagon studies in the 1980s demonstrated that comic strip narrative is still the best way of conveying understandable and retainable information. Words being the currency of our verbal ‘left’ brain, and images that of our pre-verbal ‘right’ brain, perhaps comic strip reading prompts both halves to work in unison?”